healing with nature in mind

peripatetic precipitates: on nature, healing, and homecoming

As ongoing research, press
exposure, and public receptivity push ecotherapy farther and farther into
the limelight (Linda Buzzell was just interviewed by the New York
Times, I by SELF Magazine), former colleagues in mainstream
psychology and psychotherapy have begun to confess to me that they feel
conflicted, even threatened.

Why? Because
ecotherapy feels (they have confided) like an encroachment on their territory.

I think this is a pity. It
also betrays a lack of historical understanding of the roots of their
own field. If you open a standard psychology text, you will read about
Gustav Fechner, William James, Wilhelm Wundt, Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud,
Wilhelm Reich, and (if the book was published in Europe rather than the
U.S.) possibly Carl Jung. But you will not read about the strong nature
connection each of these pioneers considered so important to human health.

Freud, for instance, could
be considered an early ecotherapist: he actively involved his dog in some
of his therapy sessions. In at least a few cases he took his clients outside
for a walk and a talk. Fechner is known as a founder of physiological
psychology, but he was also a card-carrying animist and nature mystic.
Janet, a founder of depth psychology, was a gardener.

The nature connection these
men enjoyed was not repressed out of psychiatric memory due to a conspiracy,
however, but due to conflicting paradigms.

In his famous study of scientific
paradigms (dominant ways of constructing reality), science historian Thomas
Kuhn pointed out that for a time, one view becomes the dominant "normal
science" explanation for how things work because it solves certain
problems and expresses the spirit of the time. Eventually, however, ongoing
discoveries tear gaps in the dominant view, and it finally collapses despite
the best efforts of its staunchest defenders. Then a new paradigm reigns.
We can see an example of this in a shift from the impact physics of Galileo
(reality consists of hunks of matter colliding with each other) to the
force model of Newton (reality consists of matter influencing itself from
a distance).

In psychology and psychiatry,
the dominant view has always been the machine view: human beings, the
mind, and society are automata that can be understood by taking them to
pieces and putting them back together. This is why medication has been
so popular an intervention, why the medical model dominates psychiatry,
and why we speak of "dysfunctional" families. The logic of the
machine view favors certain tools for getting at human nature (measurement,
experimental design, numbers, graphs) more than others (anecdote, poetry,
art, dream, myth). (At least one psychologist on the editorial board of
the journal Ecopsychology does not like the word "psyche"
because it is "insufficiently precise.")

Under this paradigm, which
I call the Big Machine in my Paradigms of Consciousness course, healing--which
is directed primarily at the mind rather than at the total organism or
at its relations with the environment--occurs when experts impose a more
efficient form of order or repair work on broken mental machinery. Because
the machinery cannot repair itself, it must be brought into alignment
with programming goals external to itself. Once it functions smoothly
again--smoothly in terms of its effects on surrounding machines--it can
resume its place in the larger machinery of the society into which it
finds itself plugged.

Since 1910, however, the Big
Machine paradigm has been under increasing attack on several fronts: field
theory, systems theory, quantum mechanics, deep ecology, ecopsychology,
cognitive ethology, Gaia theory, and, more recently, chaos theory, which
tells us that tiny initial conditions can create huge unpredictable consequences,
and complexity theory, which tracks unexpected patterns of order emerging
naturally from apparent chaos. Studies of ecological
resiliency, which reveal that nature tends to employ multiple, trans-linear
information systems, energy flows, and backups to preserve its ecocommunities,
have also joined in the action.

As a result of these new approaches,
we are forced at last to wonder: Is the human mind really best grasped
as a machine? Is it not more like a complex story, an ongoing poem, even
an ecosystem? Is healing really about fixing what is broken, or instead
about stepping out of the way and letting the total human organism heal
itself and rebalance itself, refreshed and revitalized with the organic
wisdom it can draw on from the natural world that evolved it? If so, then
we need only reconnect mind to nature to begin to see immediate benefits.

As the machine paradigm cracks
in the social sciences, new discoveries come to the fore. Ecotherapy,
with its field view of self-world interactions and healing, represents
one voice in the emerging Deep Web paradigm that emphasizes interconnection,
networking, participation, and cocreation. The new paradigm encourages
us to form new relationships with the living Earth all around us as well
as deep inside us: even in the psyche which mainstream thought
has insisted stands above and apart from the natural world.

I empathize with my colleagues.
They are losing a paradigm with a great weight of tradition behind it.
But they are also gaining knowledge that could help them perform even
deeper and more transformative psychotherapy and psychiatry.

As is so often the case, we
must put our hope for change in the field's newest members, as I'm discovering
as I teach ecotherapy approaches to receptive psychotherapist interns
and graduate students. They get it: evidence that the Deep Web way of
holding our relations with the world is fully capable of containing, preserving,
and extending the best of what the Big Machine worldview has collected
for us but cannot carry any farther down the road.